The Grieving Legion is a funeral that has forgotten how to end. Somewhere in the underworlds a great cortège set out to bury its dead and never arrived; the mourners walked until walking was all that remained of them, and now they process to war instead: an ocean of veiled spirits beneath mildewed banners in numbers no herald could ever call. They do not charge. They gather, the way kin gather at a graveside, and close around the living in a slow, suffocating ring.
There is a terrible etiquette to the attack. To be surrounded by the Grieving Legion is to become the guest of honour at a wake that will not adjourn: the spirits press near, wailing griefs that were never theirs, and the sorrow pouring off them settles into living hearts like grave-water into a coffin. Weapons rise more slowly, resolve thins, and soldiers have been found afterward unmarked and cold, seated where they fell as though they had simply joined the mourners.
Few processions embody the reign of Lady Olynder, Mortarch of Grief, so precisely. Where she is sorrow given a crown, the Grieving Legion is sorrow given a congregation: proof that among the Nighthaunt, even mourning can be conscripted, and that the Legion never lets the bereaved depart before the service is done.
Order of battle
The The Grieving Legion field the units of the Nighthaunt, a detachment from the roster:
Other Nighthaunt formations
Reikenor's CondemnedThe personal procession of Reikenor the Grimhailer, sworn to hunt those who use magic to cheat the grave: the necromancer hoarding stolen years, the soul-trader, the king who buys forbidden time. The Condemned drag such offenders to the judgment they postponed, and many of its gheists were once exactly such people. That, of course, is the point.
The Emerald HostShyishan folklore tells of the emerald gheist: a green-lit spirit that appears at a highborn deathbed as a curse upon the whole bloodline. The Emerald Host is the folktale made true: a procession that manifests as an omen before the fall of great houses, then arrives in force to collect. Entire dynasties have beggared themselves on wards and blessings against it, and every one of them now marches in its ranks.
The Scarlet DoomWhere other processions drift, the Scarlet Doom strikes: a shrieking spearhead of Bladegheist Revenants that hits a battleline like a scythe through standing wheat. Its name comes from what remains when the whirling blades move on. The spirits of this procession died panicked, violent deaths, and they are compelled to share that ending with everyone they find.
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